A Victorian Obsession, Leighton House Museum - exhibition review

Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has built up a huge collection of Victorian art in Mexico, of all places, and he’s lent 52 works back to the UK. They’re shown in the most appropriate of settings: Lord Leighton’s opulent 19th-century home, where the president of the Royal Academy entertained the Victorian art world. Many of the painters in the show, such as Millais and Burne-Jones, would have visited.

If you love Victoriana, then, this show is unmissable. If, like me, you still struggle with the idea that, as Britain forged on into a modern industrial world, the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers retreated into Arthurian legend and ancient myth, then you might find it missable.

It’s undoubtedly a strong collection, rich in the era’s leading artists, such as Leighton, but also in less celebrated painters such as Edward John Poynter, with his melancholy Andromeda, and John Melhuish Strudwick, an assistant to Burne Jones; technically accomplished yet lacking the gravitas of his master.

The show’s star, though, is Lawrence Alma-Tadema, painter of exquisitely detailed but kitsch tableaux bathed in Mediterranean light and heat. His vast painting Roses of Heliogabalus, the story of an ancient Syrian emperor who suffocated his guests with rose petals, is probably the most gently sensual depiction of mass slaughter in art, and is shown in a room with bouquets and an overwhelming scent of roses. Many will love this theatrical crescendo. It made me want to run for the hills.